Cisco WAAS utilizes standards-based TCP optimizations to remove TCP as a barrier to application performance over the WAN. By initiating a TCP Proxy after autodiscovery, communicating nodes experience LAN-like TCP behavior through local acknowledgement and TCP handling. As such, when the network goes down the TCP proxy has the ability to mask the disconnect for a short time, but after that all TCP connection will reset and clients will try to re-establish a connection.

For CIFS

-During transient disconnects (up to 95 seconds), the WAAS Edge maintains data in its buffers and retries the transmission to the WAAS Core upon network re-connect.

- When the WAAS Edge switches to "disconnected mode", its services change to "no service" and the buffered data is lost. Further file operations will fail and the Client will be alerted that the server is disconnected. Open documents can be "saved as" on another drive

-If the accessed file server was configured for "Disconnected Mode" CIFS clients will be able to continue to browse the cache directory and read fully cached files on an WAAS Edge

In addition with Windows on WAAS providing local window services (dns, authentication) user can access local file shares on WAVE